Big Run Overlook, at mile 81.2, looks into the Big Run valley from 2,860 feet, with Rockytop, Patterson Ridge and Rocky Mountain's white cliffs across the view and the Shenandoah Valley beyond. It is on the west side of the Drive. Trails into the head of Big Run start from the south end of the overlook, and parking for those hikes is at Doyles River, 100 yards north. The lower valley can't be reached from the park boundary, because the land there is private. Across the Drive is a small exposure of old sandstone with veins of quartz pebbles. Loft Mountain Wayside is about two miles north, and Dundo Picnic Grounds a couple of miles south.
Big Run Overlook, coming up on your left. Get your blinker on. It's among the finest in the South District, a deep, wide view framed by trees, looking into the Big Run valley, with the white cliffs of Rocky Mountain off to one side. That valley is the whole life of one stream. Big Run's highest source is a spring beside a big boulder, about three thousand feet up, right along the Drive near Loft Mountain Wayside. The naturalist Napier Shelton followed it down, and he wrote the line I'd put on its headstone, if it had one. Born in greenstone, maturing in quartzite, sandstone and shale, and dying in Valley dolomite. It changes with each few hundred feet of drop. Near the top it runs through hemlock and yellow birch, past wet mossy rocks, with juncos giving the place a northern feel. About a mile below the Drive it drops over a greenstone ledge into a glen he called decidedly primeval, with giant hemlocks. The day he went in with the park naturalist they found a weathered, rodent-chewed antler lying in the leaves, dropped who knows how many winters before. The hemlocks have had a very hard time since, so I can't promise you those. Lower down, there are brook trout in the pools in a normally wet summer. Then they stopped for lunch. Herbert Hoover had insisted that his fishing camp on the Rapidan be above two thousand feet, to escape mosquitoes. The first mosquito of the day came down on Shelton as he ate. His map put him at nineteen hundred feet. That limit, he wrote, must have been reliable. Below that line it's another country. The hemlocks gave way to big white pines, and white-barked sycamores began to appear. This wall is two thousand eight hundred and sixty feet up, so you're looking at that whole ladder from the top rung. People worked the same ladder. In the early nineteen thirties, Herbert Patterson and his son Allen grazed several hundred Herefords and about thirty horses on twenty-two hundred acres near Loft Mountain, the last ground in this park to be pastured. Every spring they drove the stock up from the Valley, and every fall they drove it back down. Going on from here, Loft Mountain Wayside is next, on your left, with gifts and snacks in season. Past it, there are no restrooms listed all the way to South River, at mile sixty-two point eight. Hikes into the head of Big Run start from this overlook, with parking at Doyles River, a hundred yards away. Private land closes the bottom of the valley, so there's no way in from below. Boone has a tale here about an army moving at night, a couple of minutes long.
Photo: NPS · Public domain (U.S. government work; Public Domain Mark on the NPS Shenandoah Flickr record)